E-Mail This Article to a Friend Dispassionata? Rethinking Maurizio Pollini, plus Boston Baroque’s Julius Caesar BY DAVID WEININGER

Throughout the 40-odd years of his career, Maurizio Pollini, who returns to Boston next Sunday, has always been regarded as an "intellectual" pianist. Whether that’s good or bad depends, of course, on who’s doing the labeling. To his fans, that means an uncanny ability to use his staggering technical ability to find the music’s essence by putting the notes before the listener as clearly and simply as possible. To his detractors, that technique becomes an end in itself, and the tag denotes a cold insensitivity to music’s full emotional range and a disinclination to push beyond what’s in the score. Whether his musicianship is intense or poker-faced depends on what you like to hear, of course, so it’s hardly surprising that intelligent listeners arrive at such dissimilar appraisals of his work.

I’ve always been more on the side of the fans than the foes, usually finding that whatever sentiment Pollini casts aside is more than compensated for by that combination of transparency, momentum, and strength that characterizes his sound. It’s true that he usually does best with music that’s "difficult" — technically, conceptually, or both. His late Schubert is as lithe and as darkly elegiac as any, his collection of Chopin Études is a gleaming treasure, and his recordings of the last five Beethoven sonatas have, to my ears, never been bettered. There’s nothing impersonal or aloof about these performances; in them, I hear Pollini reaching beyond the notes and somehow opening up the composer’s world from inside them.

Like any performer, though, he isn’t universally successful, even in different portions of the same composer’s œuvre. That’s become clear to me from last year’s recording of four Beethoven sonatas (on Deutsche Grammophon, like all of the above), including two that will be on his Symphony Hall program: the famous Appassionata, Opus 57, and its successor, the less familiar Opus 78. (The Opus 54 and Opus 90 sonatas are also included.) Four years and an immense stylistic gulf separate these two works, the former a full masterpiece of Beethoven’s "heroic" period, the latter a lyrical, enigmatic work in two short movements.

For whatever reason, Pollini can’t seem to connect with the bristling innovation of the earlier work or unlock the secrets of the later one. All the technical prowess is in evidence: the dynamic control, the clarity with which he articulates each voice, the natural phrasing, the note-perfect runs at dazzling speed. But there’s also a lack of overall shape to each work, and suddenly all those technical niceties begin to seem like so many way stations without a destination. He’s most successful in the Appassionata’s slow movement, where his understatement makes this simple set of variations transcendent. Elsewhere, though, I begin to see what his critics have been griping about .

More puzzling is the inclusion of a bonus CD with live performances of the same two sonatas recorded at a 2002 concert in Vienna. No two performances are exact replicas, but Pollini rarely strays too far from his interpretive decisions on stage, and these are no exceptions. Indeed, they’re similar enough to the studio versions to make you wonder what pianist and label thought they would be offering the listener besides slightly inferior sound and the frisson of hearing Pollini make a few rare finger slips.

Still, Pollini on a mediocre day ranks higher with me than many high-profile pianists at the top of their game. For next Sunday’s outing, in addition to the Beethoven, he’ll play a second half of Chopin: the two Opus 32 Nocturnes, the A-flat Ballade, and the "Funeral March" Sonata in B-flat minor. It’s a Bank of America Celebrity Series presentation at Symphony Hall at 3 p.m. on October 24, and tickets run from $37 to $67; call (617) 482-6661.

YOU COME, YOU HEAR, HE CONQUERS. By now the whole world must know that next weekend also marks James Levine’s inaugural concert as the BSO’s music director. Those who aren’t going to hear Mahler’s Eighth might want to consider stopping by Jordan Hall for the equally triumphal Julius Caesar, probably Handel’s most popular opera and certainly one of his best. That comes courtesy of Boston Baroque, whose music director, Martin Pearlman, conducts a semi-staged performance sung in Italian with English supertitles. Countertenor David Walker has the title role; Lisa Saffer sings Cleopatra. That’s at Jordan Hall next Friday and Saturday, October 22 and 23, at 7:30 p.m., and tickets are $27 to $63; call (617) 484-9200.